Houdini is an incredibly cool tool: https://www.sidefx.com/products/houdini/

One of the things I most dislike about tools like Blender is that it can be really hard to go back to earlier stages of the process and make adjustments. Most changes are destructive, even though they don't really need to be. I follow lots of digital artists on Twitter and some of them use Houdini, and the kind of stuff they can generate is just mindblowing.

I'd try it out myself if it weren't for the price; I've always been drawn to procedural creation as a bridge between what a person imagines and what they can get a computer to render.

For messing around, Apprentice version is free and can do pretty much anything the full version (FX) can, except render in insane resolution. Also, Indie version is cheap (~$200/year).

Some people do completely non-destructive modelling in Blender using its modifier stack. You can see an example of that here: https://youtu.be/Atw16f8wZ6Y

I'm also a big fan of Houdini, though, and would recommend the free edition to anyone wanting to learn. It's the most fully featured piece of free software I've ever used. I almost can't believe that it's free, it's so good!

I think Houdini is a different kind of beast.

You have software like 3ds Max, Maya, C4D, Blender and others. And then you have Houdini.

But you can use Blender more procedural with the modifier stack. And there are great add-ons like Boxcutter: https://blendermarket.com/products/hard-ops--boxcutter-ultim...

Someone in a recent discussion about randomly-generated spaceships in Blender linked this: https://github.com/aachman98/Sorcar

Not terribly familiar with how things work in Houdini (and only dabbling in Blender a few times), but that's been compared to it.

That looks pretty cool.

Is the price really the blocker? How much does it cost? I looked at the indie edition and it seemed affordable. They also have a free edition: https://www.sidefx.com/buy/#houdini-free.

Affordable, but a little hard to justify as a casual user who just wants to mess around and doesn't really plan on building anything complete

It’s completely free for the casual user who just wants to mess around, as long as they don’t use it for commercial work. Almost all features supported, except external renderers and certain geometry exports.

There are some great free tutorials here: https://entagma.com/

It's not the price that's the problem. It's that it is closed source, and therefore any work you produce is on a guaranteed path to bitrot.

Isn't the final rendered product portable? Also, I'd imagine you could always export the necessary assets into a format less prone to bitrot.

I don't know of any format that supports full parametric modeling the way Houdini does.

As the OP said, parametric modelling is what makes Houdini so nice.

And if you want any chance to rework anything in a project - say - 10 years later, exporting to a "baked" format is a dead end.

What's preventing the development of an open model/data format for parametric modelling?

Because every feature and parameter would have to be baked into the format and every editor would have to offer those same features and no more.

There's always a trade-off between editability and fidelity with any format. Non-destructive stacks of modifiers bring that trade-off into sharp relief.

Yes.. not only offer the exact same features but any software that tries to implement the format would have to agree on the exact algorithms for the transformations represented by each procedural step. Any error in any one of those algorithms would cascade into subsequent steps and could generate a completely different final product

Some amount of variation is desirable in any artistic endeavor.

I agree, the lack of parametric modeling is one of the most frustrating thing about blender (that and the super weird multi-object select/deselect workflow)

The modifier stack is, to a limited extent, a flaccid ersatz for full-blown parametric, but it's light-years away from what Houdini can do.

>One of the things I most dislike about tools like Blender is that it can be really hard to go back to earlier stages of the process and make adjustments.

I do not think it is a big drawback of Blender since other tools such as Maya and 3ds Max are also destructive.

By "tools like Blender" I meant the entire category.

Links to artists you recommend?

Some names + Twitter handles: Ben Watts (http://twitter.com/benwattsdesign), Simon Holmedal (http://twitter.com/Sholmedal), Serjan Burlak (http://twitter.com/biogenicdesign), Rohan Dalvi (http://twitter.com/RohanCreates), Tim van Helsdingen (http://twitter.com/TvanHelsdingen)

Also, I had this little side project a while back: http://twitter.com/tobyliad (shameless plug :))

Here's a pretty awesome one: https://twitter.com/qornflex/status/1195701316418490368

Lots of wise observations in TFA.

'Most people probably do not directly register it, but we are great pattern recognition machines, and to make procedural generation believable the patterns we face on daily basis should be present.'

Absolutely true. Most artists know this, but are unable to effectively describe these patterns. Instead, these patterns 'posses' them, and from this possession comes the art. Its kinda like the car driving the motorist.

'For me, this process resembles painting: first, you make very wide and general brush strokes and only then, when you are satisfied with that stage, you start refining and adding specifics.'

A simple observation, but very true. The student mistake is to obsess over details (small features) before the layout (large features) phase is complete. The lack of an undo in oil painting taught me a lot about process.

I slowly realised similar principles when character posing in Daz Studio:

* Work from the core body (hip and 'spine') out to the extremities

* Weight bearing limbs first

Only then obsess about the positions of the fingers

I wish the documentation had said this as well as going on about the mechanics of the user interface

Don't forget https://twitter.com/OskSta and TownScaper https://store.steampowered.com/app/1291340/Townscaper/

Didn't know he did that in Houdini. Thought it was a Unity project.

Here's the twitter profile of Anastasia Opara: https://twitter.com/anastasiaopara

I recommend following her - she does amazing things at Embark Studios these days :)

Impressive demo, although...

Never built a palafitta by hand, but I'm not sure it makes sense for the foundation poles to be only on the external perimeter.

Christopher Alexander wrote a lot of books with rules for building. He also said in one of his talks that he could imagine software that could generate a building (or the basic form) with the rules as constraints but with user input for the details.

I believe that would be great to have. And this post looks very promising that such software is possible.

There's a pretty cool project by oskar stalberg that does something like that (arguably even better because the output is often very beautiful).

https://twitter.com/OskSta/status/1266264444276858884

Arguably the first iteration of that was Sketchpad (1963). You had a template with rules, then you could change parameters (e.g. size) and it'd apply the template rules to the new input.

Here's an Alan Kay talking about it in 1987: https://archive.org/details/AlanKeyD1987?start=249.5

Houdini is a great tool, but caveat emptor: proprietary tool.

This looks like the Fallout 4 Far Harbor expansion mod that I've always wanted.

Author alert: "The The lake houses..."

Wow. Now throw this into an MMO! :)

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